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Finally, She’s Part of a ‘Chorus Line’

Rachelle Rak, foreground, rehearsing the Paper Mill Playhouse production of “A Chorus Line.”Credit
Robert Caplin for The New York Times

IN her 25 years as a performer Rachelle Rak has worked wherever she could, from a “West Side Story” bus tour across Europe to a “Starlight Express” in Las Vegas to many a stop as a Broadway dancer. But for all of that, not getting a job may have brought her the most fame.

The scene was the end of a grueling eight-month audition process for the 2006 Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line,” when Ms. Rak — a straight-shooting, seen-it-all showgirl — was a seeming shoo-in to play Sheila, a straight-shooting, seen-it-all showgirl. This wasn’t just conjecture: the audition process was followed by a film crew that recorded the revival’s casting director, Jay Binder, lobbying for Ms. Rak.

And then, Ms. Rak muffed it. At the final callback, she was unable to replicate an earlier audition and lost the role to another actress, a moment of acute heartbreak captured for posterity in the film.

It was not only a personal lesson in humility — “I honestly started to believe what the buzz was,” Ms. Rak says now — but more evidence of an old actors’ maxim: Sometimes the toughest characters to land are the ones closest to yourself.

So with some small degree of satisfaction, for both Ms. Rak and the legions of actors who sympathized with her cinematic disappointment, she is finally getting her chance at Sheila. It won’t be on Broadway — it opens on Sunday at the well-respected Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J. — but it is still “A Chorus Line,” a sacred text of dancers everywhere and a show that Ms. Rak feels she’s lived, though she’s never been in it. “There is no story that I know better than this one,” she said.

Photo

Rachelle Rak, center, in the Broadway production of “Catch Me if You Can.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

At 41, Ms. Rak proudly represents that special Broadway breed: the gypsy, that hustling, high-kicking and often hardly known hoofer without whom stars would have no one to dance in front of. (They are the very same people, of course, whom Michael Bennett tapped when he developed and directed the original “Chorus Line” in the mid-1970s.) She’s got the scars to prove it: a hip flexor that required surgery; a fractured rib from a fall during the technical rehearsals of “The Look of Love”; and more broken heels than she can count.

“There are very few people who are as much of a survivor as she is,” Mr. Binder said in a recent telephone interview. “She’s someone that young dancers should admire and look up to.”

She cites her experience as an accomplishment, her years in the ensemble and featured roles in the Broadway musicals “Oklahoma!,” “Fosse,” “Catch Me if You Can” and others.

“It makes me sad to think that’s how little that people think of the supporting characters in a musical, because for me, when I started, it was to be a part of Broadway,” she said. “That was enough.” Nowadays, however, she said, some younger performers think only of stardom. “The ensemble is less than,” she said.

Ms. Rak’s mother, Rosalene, ran a dance studio in Pittsburgh. Her father, Kenny, was an insurance salesman. (Like Sheila’s folks, they didn’t get along and eventually divorced, though Ms. Rak stayed close with both.) She was only 17 and a senior in high school when she auditioned for a national tour of “Cats” at an open call and ended up on the road.

Photo

Rachelle Rak, center, in “Heat Wave: The Jack Cole Project,” performed this year at Queens Theater in the Park.Credit
Angel Franco/The New York Times

“I didn’t go to college,” she said. “I went to ‘Cats.’ ”

While she was thrilled with the job, the tour would end up teaching her another rule of the theater: Nothing runs forever, not even “Cats,” which, of course, was supposed to.

“You think this is the big time,” Ms. Rak said, “and it lasted four and a half months.”

With large brown eyes and a brunet mane, Ms. Rak has a face that is more gentle and friendly in person than on her Web site, where she strikes an aggressive pose, with waist-high fishnets, unzipped leather jacket and “What about it?” expression. (Her nickname is Sas, as in attitude, not the Scandinavian airline.) She is old school, she says — no sneakers, no sweats at rehearsals. Her makeup is on, and her hair ready too.

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And she’s not shy. She’s been a mainstay and a choreographer for “Broadway Bares,” the risqué charity striptease, and her online photos of the event are a pastie away from being “not safe for work.” “It is just good, clean, dirty fun,” she said.

For the past five years she has bounced, as she put it, part of a conscious decision to say yes to whatever work came her way after the Broadway “Chorus Line” didn’t.

She did benefits. She taught. She made YouTube videos. She choreographed on cruise ships. She got married — her husband, Andy Hoey, is a commodities and equities trader — and moved to New Jersey. And she did low-paying shows she loved, including “Heat Wave: The Jack Cole Project,” about the jazz dance master, which ran this year at the Queens Theater in the Park.

Video

Rachelle Rak in 'A Chorus Line'

Scenes with Rachelle Rak as Sheila in the Paper Mill Playhouse’s revival of the musical “A Chorus Line.”

“It was like going to work for a dollar and a lip gloss,” Ms. Rak said with a laugh. “My husband said, ‘You have to take two bridges to get there?’ And I said, ‘I’m doing it for my soul!’ ”

Mitzi Hamilton, the director of the Paper Mill production, saw Ms. Rak in “Heat Wave” (as well as “Every Little Step”) and immediately wanted her. Ms. Hamilton said she could just come to callbacks, but Ms. Rak went to the first round of auditions anyway.

“I had nothing to lose,” she said. “Once everyone sees you not get the job, you’re like, ‘Ah, this is just a room full of people.’ ”

Just as in “Every Little Step” Ms. Rak seemed right for the part but was given some direction. This time, she nailed it.

“I gave her an adjustment,” Ms. Hamilton said, “and she did it right the second time.”

As for Sheila, Ms. Rak said that while she and the character are not the same — she’d never slouch off during an audition, she said — both understand frustration, near misses and the need for endurance in the theater. And while losing out on the Broadway revival was painful, Ms. Rak said the experience, like so many in front of the footlights, left a lesson.

“I can only be me,” she said. “Either you want my energy and my talent, or you don’t. I’m going to teach and work, and I’m going to bounce. That’s what ‘A Chorus Line’ taught me.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 7, 2012, on Page AR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Finally, She’s Part of a ‘Chorus Line’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe